New telecom policy will address sectoral stress, says Manoj Sinha

"The policy will take into account latest technology advancements, IoT, 5G, artificial intelligence. But I don't think this is a revenue generation department," Manoj Sinha said.

"Telecom will act as a facilitator to other services, and will create a lot of business and startup opportunit... Read More

(This story originally appeared in on Sep 2 , 2017)

Telecom minister Manoj Sinha has said the government will give considerable relief to a sector under stress due to intense competition and high debt. In an interview with Gulveen Aulakh and Romit Guha, Sinha said the government can further address pain points in the new telecom policy (NTP), which will be in place by March 2018. The minister expects a return to stability over some quarters as consolidation gathers pace, leaving Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone-Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications-Aircel-MTS combines as survivors, besides the state-run BSNL and MTNL. He also said the four to five players will ensure competition and no cartelisation, which will protect consumer tariffs. Edited excerpts…Given the stress and competition, the sector appears unhappy with what they perceive as limited steps recommended by the inter-ministerial group (IMG). Your comments... There will be considerable relief. I can’t go into the details as the IMG has submitted the report. But there was stress, that's why IMG was constituted. IMG has ideated on the systemic issues affecting rivalry and repayment capacity and made recommendations. Now the Telecom Commission will take a call. By the time we create NTP, we will have a clear picture of everything, so if required, we will take a call (on the other issues raised by telcos).

Do you expect the competitive landscape to change soon? By when do you expect the sector to stabilise and return to revenue generation? When a new entrant comes in, market becomes a little destabilised, but then it stabilises. The way M&As are happening and based on experience, the sector should normalise. Players had spectrum issues in the previous year's auction, but to fully deploy networks with new technologies like (4G) LTE and utilise them, takes 10-12 months after auction. The market is also big, so I think competitive environment will remain and sector will also stabilise.

There is fear consolidation may lead to tariffs rising, hurting consumers... Nowhere in the world would you have such a high number of players. We will have four to five players remaining after consolidation — Airtel, Jio, Idea-Voda, RCom-Aircel, and public sector telcos BSNL and MTNL. I think with so many players, there will neither be lack of competition, nor cartelisation.

Keeping in view health of the industry and ongoing consolidation, is 2017-18 a good time to hold another round of auctions? Let Trai finish the work (consultation), we will hold the auction whenever we feel that it is the right time.

What according to you are the few critical things that will be there for carriers in the new telecom policy? The policy will take into account latest technology advancements, IoT, 5G, artificial intelligence. But I don't think this is a revenue generation department. We must think a lot of things can be done in the country based on the telecom sector. This is critical infrastructure that must be created as soon as possible so everyone can get internet and connectivity. Telecom will act as a facilitator to other services, and will create a lot of business and startup opportunities in rural areas.

There’s a demand to label the sector as essential services. Your thoughts? You can call it essential to some extent but not as essential as electricity or water. In the days to come, the utility of technology will be quite high, so it may well be considered as essential service in the future. But nothing is being considered at present.

Have any demands of showing the level of data security been asked of carriers or network providers? Security is our prime concern. We need not talk about companies from specific countries but, even if they’re local or foreign, if we think there is a threat on data protection or security, we certainly take action.

How is Bharat Net progressing? Will the March 2019 target be met?

After crossing all the hurdles, we have met the target of laying down fibre two months before the deadline. Our end-to-end connectivity is currently at 80,000 gram panchayats. So, the pace has been growing. We have made internet available in over 32,000 villages. According to our experience from the first phase, we feel that we can meet the second phase deadline.

Have BSNL, MTNL financial positions improved to your expectation?

BSNL’s improvement is satisfactory. If you take into consideration that even after the entry of a new entrant, BSNL is the only service provider whose market share has increased, albeit by a small margin. MTNL had appointed Deloitte (for turning itself around) and the report has also come. We have kept a meeting on September 1 with the MD of MTNL and telecom secretary, where the discussion on revival of MTNL will be the key point.

Will the Department of Posts be able to meet the target of 650 payment bank branches by September? There have been hurdles. It took us lot of time to finalize technology partner because the scale and technology. HPGS (Hewlett Packard) has now been selected as technology partner and system integrator for setting up of Indian Postal Bank branches. We're doing parallel work on data centre, disaster recovery, inter-operability, business continuity, etc. We think that by February-March 2018, we will be able to roll out all the branches.

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